This is amazing’

This is an amazing opportunity to leverage UVa’s compute power in pursuit of humanities questions. Happy to share my experience applying just year if anyone would like to talk.

Working on this right now!

I find data such a useful way into textual analysis and I think that it brings real insight. But the problem is that it takes me so long that I read less. How do you balance data-orientated research with more traditional library work?

I once wrote to the actor Geoffrey Palmer about writing a memoir (I was working as an agent at the time). He took the time to call me up and tell me, in about 15 seconds or so, that he didn’t want to do it and then hung up. I was so shocked I’m not sure I spoke at all.

It’s always sad to lose books pages. It makes me wonder though if generalist book coverage has/had much impact on the market. I always assumed — based on my v limited experience— that focused papers like LRB / TLS/LARB are more effective because of their audience.

Advanced level parenting is eating while baby wearing and then not spilling food on worn baby. It is beyond my skills right now.

V DC moment -- overhearing a neighbour complain that their next door neighbour is a congressman who is away and hasn't shovelled the snowcrete in front of their house.

I am very lucky in that I get to use UVA's high performance computing services for my work but it means I've become an obsessive refresher of Active Jobs. It's quite a shift from playing with jupyter notebooks and the anticipation is something else.

Why does American etiquette not specify when to use Yours sincerely or Yours faithfully? I had this hammered into me as a child and was met by disbelief when I mentioned it to my American wife.

I haven’t been back to LA for more than 15 years but Cole’s was a great place to eat when I lived there. We used to spend plenty of boozy nights downtown too and I always imagined that it vibrancy had persisted. A shame that it’s been lost. airmail.news/sh/V5hPrr

I am lucky to live in Washington DC, close to a marine barracks. One of the stranger moments I experience is the occasional sunrise (American) national anthem drifting towards me and my sleeping son. That, and the low-flying helicopters thudding over, make it impossible to forget where we live.

Today I changed the cartridge in my shower faucet. This involved learning that faucets require cartridges and manipulating a retention pin in 4 dimensions to make it fit.

Little piece of news from the break

F1 was mediocre at best. A lot of talent and potential but hemmed in by a poor script / story line. Off to a good start in Christmas Movie Marathon

If only there was a name for the day after Christmas Day…To make it memorable.

10 days out from B-Day and biggest parenting challenging so far: folding the damn snoo box into a stable enough package that it can be kept somewhere out of the way.

This chart is an attempt to understand the influence Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen had on 19th century fiction. It’s the result of a PCA analysis and plots the closeness of a reference set (of2.5k novels) are to Austen and Edgeworth each decade. The lower the line the more closer / more similar

Sad to learn of death of Tom Stoppard. One of my favourite facts about him was that he wrote all the dialogue for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade but was uncredited.

Yes please come! We’ll be loading up local LLM’s and using statistical tests to assess success.

Anyone know what is happening in NW DC? Roads closed from North Capitol and lots of police.

Sage advice from app designed to prepare me for fatherhood

Glad I live in world where when you ask for brine at the deli they give you a bucket of the stuff. It’s a 3-olive martini day. Happy Thanksgiving to all

TRUMP [after spending 5 minutes with Zohran]: surplus value, it’s a very wonderful thing, very wonderful, and they’re stealing it. Can you believe that? We’re going to be looking very strongly at the bourgeoisie, what they’re up to

Thank you for coming!

UVA people, please join us tomorrow at 11am in The Scholar’s Lab where I’ll be talking with Professor Adrienne Ghaly about our use of LLM’s to look for biodiversity in nineteenth century prose fiction. There’s lunch and we’re looking for feedback on our work.

she’s a 10 but Excel thinks she’s October

A preview of a slide from Saturday’s #NAVSA2025 talk on Maria Edgeworth. I built a network of adverts featuring Edgeworth and Austen where the edges are other titles and authors. This graph shows the size of the nodes and visualises Edgeworth’s declining prestige in adverts across 19th century

Very much looking forward to talking about Maria Edgeworth’s reception in the second half in 19th C in Saturday at #NAVSA2025

@twilliams81.bsky.social reviews Elly McCausland’s “Swifterature”: "McCausland the fan is balanced against McCausland the scholar, though at times the scholar is forced to take charge." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/its-me-hi-im-the-problem/

My review of Swifterature: A Love Story came out today in @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social It was fun to work on and I now know all the lyrics to The Life of Ophelia because of it. lareviewofbooks.org/article/its-...

Looking forward to talking at the DH Center at UVA on 11/18 about a project I’m working on with Prof Adrienne Ghaly. Can AI help us understand how biodiversity is represented in 19th century fiction?If you’re in Charlottesville and would like to know more, please come along.

There is nothing more heckle-raising than reading AI assisted essays but, as frustrating as it is, is there not a case for using agentic AI to turn archives like The Publisher’s Circular into a database? It would need supervision of course and compute costs might be high but would it be useful?

Congratulations @guenterleypoldt.bsky.social ! Can’t wait to read this

DEAR GRAD STUDENTS, This March @post45data.bsky.social will be holding a free, online mini-workshop for grads working in the fields of contemporary literature and culture. More info / abstract submission here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... 1/4

Ooof. Flashbacks to the late 90s with this one I scored 61 on the AI purity test. aipuritytest.org

Deliver Me on Netflix is extraordinary tv. It’s a Swedish version of s04 of The Wire and is 💔

If you ever wondered what the NG are doing in DC…

Looks like UVa has rejected the compact

Nervously running a script written with codex on ~17k 19th century adverts. Missing the comfort of Jupyter notebooks and tqdm.

Public art in DC www.reddit.com/r/washington...

Some fun with Sora. It’s all a bit BBC drama but kind of amazing all the same